Steal his movie and Simon Klose will thank you

AUSTIN, Texas — Simon Klose would like you to steal his movie. Stream it, download it, share it with someone in Croatia or Brazil and remix it with videos of kittens playing patty-cake, if that's your kind of thing.

Klose, 37, is the director of the documentary "The Pirate Bay: Away From Keyboard," which follows the eccentric co-founders of the Swedish file-sharing network the Pirate Bay over four years, including their 2009 trial on copyright infringement charges. Shot like a thriller in the stark light of Stockholm, "TPB: AFK" pits its hoodie-clad young subjects, who created the world's largest piracy site and are part of a global anti-copyright movement, against large American media companies such as 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures and Warner Bros.

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<b>FOR THE RECORD:</b><br>

Pirate Bay: An earlier version of the caption with the photo accompanying this story misidentified Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg as director Simon Klose. <br>

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Like Abbie Hoffman's 1971 counterculture text "Steal This Book," Klose's movie is a provocation — and so is the manner in which he's releasing it. At the moment of its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February, Klose made the full, 85-minute movie available for free on YouTube, where it has since been viewed roughly 1.7 million times. (Watch it here.) Earlier this month, upon its U.S. debut at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, he released it on iTunes and launched a free Web application that allows filmmakers and viewers to embed and access hyperlinks in the movie from their phones.

On his website, Klose tracks the number of people sharing his movie at any given time via the Pirate Bay's servers — on a recent day, more than 5,500 people had made it available to others to download.

"I made this choice to put out this film online for free, 'cause I wanted to make a statement and show my core audience that I understand how they feel," Klose said. "I wanted to release the film the way I wanted to receive it as a film fan. ... It's out. It's on YouTube. Boom!"

Klose's movie is one of a handful of new films about the transformative and often legally ambiguous culture of the Internet. "Downloaded," a documentary about Napster, the pioneering file-sharing service that helped derail the music industry in the early 2000s, also premiered at South by Southwest and will be shown on VH1 in coming months. "We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks," a documentary about the website that published classified U.S. government documents, opens in theaters May 24. "The Fifth Estate," a live-action film starring Benedict Cumberbatch as WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange, is due in November. And "We Are Legion," a documentary that traces the activist hacker group Anonymous, became available to stream or download last fall.

The movies share a special digital-era challenge — how to dramatize a revolution that is happening in the form of 0s and 1s.

For Klose, the solution came in the antiheroes at the center of his story — Pirate Bay co-founders Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg. Klose met Sunde at a 2008 rally against a Swedish wiretapping law. Drawn in by Sunde's passion and idealism about the need for a free and open Internet, Klose began trying to cultivate a relationship with the Pirate Bay "AFK" or "away from keyboard," an Internet phrase used in the title of the movie that refers to meeting someone offline.

"I was like, dude, who are these guys who are giving the finger to the international media industry?" said Klose, who has a law degree and has directed Swedish music videos, commercials and shorts. "They're at the forefront of a global movement. They have all these great stories, about politics and pranks." (A recent example — after Dennis Rodman's visit to North Korea, the site issued a false press release saying that Pirate Bay had sought virtual asylum there).

Klose has spent an extraordinary amount of time with the founders of the Pirate Bay, which today is the Internet's 73rd busiest website, according to the Web traffic ranking site Alexa. He followed them to Stockholm courtroom hearings, a subterranean bunker where they stored their servers, a bus trip to Italy for an art show and southeast Asia, where they vacationed and where Neij got married.

Sunde, 34, emerges as the group's earnest spokesman; Neij, 34, its wisecracker; and Warg, 28, its recluse. Together they often seem too clever by half — one of Warg and Neij's early joint projects was a website called America's Dumbest Soldiers, which asked users to rate how dumb Iraq war soldiers were based on how they died. Klose's lens captures the darkness of the young men, as when Neij delivers a drunken anti-immigrant rant in a bar , and multiple interview subjects reference Warg's drug use.

The Pirate Bay doesn't produce content of its own but rather serves as a kind of online trading floor for its users to exchange movies, TV shows, music, software and video games with one another without paying for them — on a recent visit to the site, copies of the just released DreamWorks Animation movie "The Croods," the new A&E TV drama "Bates Motel" and the first-person shooter video game "BioShock Infinite" were readily available to download for free.

To many copyright holders — and to the Swedish courts — the Pirate Bay is neither prankster nor revolutionary but a crook that deprives artists and businesses of income. As Klose documents, the site is anarchically organized — the Pirate Bay has no formal boss or office space but is run by a handful of techies holding online meetings in chat rooms from their laptops around the world.

In February 2012, Sweden's Supreme Court upheld a criminal conviction on copyright infringement charges against Neij, Sunde and Warg. Sunde is in Sweden waiting to serve an eight-month prison sentence; Neij is living in Laos, where Klose said he is wanted by Interpol; and Warg was arrested in Cambodia and deported to Sweden, where he is serving a one-year sentence for unrelated hacking charges.

"By facilitating the theft and distribution of such a large amount of creative content, the Pirate Bay has harmed the workers and business people whose livelihoods depend on these products," said the Motion Picture Assn. of America, the trade group that represents the six major movie studios, in a statement about Klose's film. "And it has damaged the consumer experience by pushing stolen, illegitimate content into the marketplace."

Klose is unapologetically on the side of his subjects, which puts him in the unusual position of creating a piece of intellectual property intended for an audience that largely sneers at the concept of intellectual property.

"I love the Internet," said Klose, who was animated despite having gotten just an hour of sleep the night before while preparing to launch his app. "That's my main stance. Sure, people have been losing money. But at every technological paradigm shift, people lose money. I don't think it means we should go back to the system before the Internet. I see the Internet as a tool that should give my audience a better experience. The media industry hasn't been able to adjust to that. They don't deliver films the way the audience wants to consume them. It's impossible to stream or download a new film unless you pirate it."

Klose paid for his movie with crowd-funding, grants from the Swedish, Norwegian and Danish film institutes and the sale of rights to six TV networks, including the BBC. In Sweden, he has registered as a film distributor, and he is touring with his movie there like an indie rock band with a new album to promote. In the U.S., he has no plans for a theatrical release.

"I knew that making the film available online would kill off theatrical deals," Klose said. "But that doesn't mean I don't want to see my film on the big screen. My film is made for the big screen."

Klose also created his Web app, LinkLib, with the Google-happy habits of modern movie and TV audiences in mind. The app, which users access by scanning a barcode on a corner of a piece of video with their phones, enables them to look at Web links associated with the content they're watching — an actor's resume on IMDB, for instance; an iTunes link for the band playing on the soundtrack; a recipe for that cocktail Jon Hamm is drinking on "Mad Men."

Klose has begun sharing his app with other filmmakers and is getting a positive response, he said. For his own movie, Klose embedded dozens of links, including film festival reviews, a blog entry by Sunde criticizing the final product as too "dark and gloomy" and a hello video from Warg that was smuggled out of prison.